Atlantic High by William F. Buckley Jr. Read Free Book Online

geometrically, and those who charter a sailing boat of ninety feet expecting both to sail and to luxuriate are going to do one or the other—almost inevitably the latter, since that turns out to be the preference, given the alternatives, of those who charter huge sailing boats.
    However, the captain or owner is not absolved from responsibility. He should frankly acknowledge the limitations of his vessel, if only to tamp down the revolution of rising expectations. Of course, there is no organic reason for failure to carry extra battens, or sail tape, or stitching gear.
    An appropriate moment, as I think back on that first day’s sail-in the drizzle, and against the seas to Levuka Harbor—to define a rule I have finally decocted, and wonder that it has not been formulated before:
    The sea, if you leave aside for a moment the factor of vicissitudes, which obviously overrule even the most elaborate fine-tuning, is an invitation to tranquillity. I lay it down as an unchallengeable, uncontradictable proposition that there is an irreconcilable incompatibility between very loud noise and tranquillity. One can, of course, get used to anything. In
My Sister Eileen
, where the play’s two principals lived in a basement apartment next to the Third Avenue El in New York City which before it was torn down used to roar by every seven minutes with a noise the designers of the Concorde would have pronounced intolerable, the author-director managed a marvelous manipulation of the players and the audience by causing the actors, every seven minutes for about ten seconds, to raise their voices to screaming pitch, as though nothing unusual had happened. After a while the audience almost failed to notice the difference, much as one gets accustomed to the background noise on an old record, training the ear to hear only Caruso.
    But on the other hand noise is noise, even as ugliness is ugliness. There are instruments that measure, with scientific exactitude, decibels of sound. Since this is the season for constitutional amendments, I propose one that would require every charter spec sheet to give out the decibel level, at engine cruising speed, 1) in each stateroom; 2) at the cockpit; 3) at the doghouse; 4) in the main saloon. The prospect of a five-hour run from one Fijian island to another under power in hostile sea conditions to a significant degree varies in the intensity of discomfort with the volume of engine noise. I know one or two people whose conversational patter has made me long for the relief of the robust noise of passing subways; but there were none such aboard the
Tau
, and when the engine operated, which was most of the time during the eastward passages, communication was virtually excluded in the principal areas of social congregation, and inflected conversation could only have taken place in the crow’s nest. I found that most of my companions sought out narcotic relief, either in escapist literature, spirits, or sleep: not infrequently all three, a useful progressive curve. Why is it, on cruises, that one tends to nap in the afternoon? An odious bourgeois indulgence. We tell ourselves it is the wind and the salt and the exuberance of corporal health. I say it is probably nature’s reaction to an unnatural licentiousness at lunch, a guard against the possibility of boredom during a long day; and—I say this with utter gravity—a means of attempting to solace oneself against a grinding, encephalophonic engine noise which, however we adjust to it in the manner of our sister Eileen, insinuates its insidious vibrations into our nervous system leaving us, at the end of a day’s experience, with the ocean’s equivalent of jet lag. A kind of noise jag.
    Tuesday
. A great day. Unforgettable. Where oh where have I been? Why did nobody tell me? (Everybody did, for years, but I did not listen.) The divers were convening for the first plunge. But to begin with, Vane would check me out—to see what I could handle after my hour in the